@travis-butler said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:
@bartzbb said in May we get light novel translations with honorifics:
I don't mind if the honorifics are removed as long as the setting is not based on Japanese culture.
If the setting is in a medieval fantasy then it's fine if they are removed but if in that medieval setting there is a country or culture that is based from Japan then I expect that the people there would use honorifics and it would only be exclusive to that place.
But if the story uses a Japanese setting I would prefer to keep the honorifics as is. Even if the setting also has some sci-fi and supernatural elements.
To me, it's all about how smoothly it reads; I don't really care about Japan vs non-Japan setting. If an honorific can be replaced smoothly, I don't mind, no matter where it's set; if it's expressing a distinction that requires awkward phrasing to reproduce, then I don't like it being translated.
I expect the latter case would be more common in Japanese settings, but some of the worst translation hiccups I've encountered have been in fantasy settings.
Is your objection here that you don't like seeing translation-ese replacements for difficult-to-translate honorifics? If so, I have an alternative suggestion to propose: skip over difficult-to-translate honorifics.
By analogy to another "difficult" case: Japanese has a lot of first person pronouns - watashi, watakushi, atashi, wasshi, boku, ore, to list some of the more common ones. Which one a character refers to themselves by is part of that character's voice and how they're presented to the audience. English isn't equipped to properly translate these words as words. Most translations I've read either omit the meaning communicated by a character's voice and choice of first person pronoun or move it to prose outside the dialogue. I believe something similar could be done with difficult honorifics.